17 Sep 2024
It’s been a bit, let’s recap what’s happened in the last 9 months!
Cacowards 2023 was back in December 2023, and “The Diseases, and Casualties this year being 1632” won Runner-Up! There were loads of great maps last year, and our community pack getting picked for inclusion was very heartwarming. The biggest shoutouts go out to granggg, A.o.D., Weird Sandwich, and LeschNyhan, for who this pack would never have happened without their amazing maps.
On top of that, mycrimes.wad also received a mention in the super-secret myhouse.wad section of the Cacowards! Thanks to Scuba Steve for including it, it was incredibly fun to make.
“Peeballs Anomaly” is a The Ultimate Doom E1M8 replacement map. It’s vanilla compatible and contains a bit more challenge than the standard E1M8 provides while keeping the layout mostly the same. Mostly. Kinda’. There’s lots more decorations, enemies, and secrets to be found here! Speaking of secrets, be sure to take a peek at the automap every now and then. I released this back in December 2023 as a bit, and it’s still a very good bit.
Also a quick update on Doom By Numbers, it is still very much In Progress. Each map having its own unique music track and gimmick means it’s going to take a lot more effort than my usual maps, but I’m hoping to get that one out the door sometime this decade.
I’ve dabbled in NES development before, but it was very much dabbling. My first attempt was years ago, making an NES port of my first jam game Missile Champions using Shiru’s neslib C library. I got a good amount done for the title screen and car selection, but the actual gameplay would corrupt within a few seconds. I had no idea what was going wrong, so I set that project back down and didn’t look at it again.
Fast forward to about two months ago when I found the Pikuma NES Programming Course which helped explain a lot of concepts and pitfalls you can encounter while working with the NES. Now I’m back on the homebrew train and working on a port of another game to get my NES sea legs. It’s not Missile Champions, and it may fall into Copyright Infringement, but if I do release it I’ll have a lot of graphics to update so that I don’t get turbosued. Still, it’s been a lot of fun to work with! I was even able to make a level editor in Godot that exports level bytecode for use in the ROM.
I’ll have another post detailing that progress later on (please hold me to this, i’ve been doing it all on bluesky), but for now here’s a picture of the level editor I worked extremely hard on.
I’ve got an account over there! Look at my posts! The Bluesky butterfly is also replacing the Twitter bird I had in the header links since I don’t really go there anymore. I’m leaving the account up to prevent anyone else from grabbing the handle, but don’t expect me to reply on Twitter or anything.
I am also over on Mastodon but I’m not posting there much. That’s only because I have a terrible attention span though.
Before I forget, take a look at the GAMEDEV WEBRING over on the right side menu! Rainbow Cemetery has been growing the list of sites included in the webring, and it’s a fun bit of old internet that’ll let you find other fun web sites. It may also eat your balls.
Maybe! I’ve got a couple projects in the pipeline, including the NES game and a couple of Godot projects. I’m also sitting on a new release of Palette Studio with functional dithering, but I need to make a proper post for that. And probably a full subsite too. There’s a lot to talk about, and hopefully I remember to put those into words on a more regular basis.
